Carpe Fulgur Collection

Carpe Fulgur - the tiny translation/localisation team that brought the West Recettear, Chantelise and Fortune Summoners - is doing just fine, as reported on the company's blog. They may have been outwardly fairly quiet since the release of Fortune Summoners, but they've been beavering away at their biggest localisation job yet: XSEED's Trails in the Sky. To clarify: they're doing the second chapter of the celebrated JRPG series, with the first heading to Western PCs sometime this Winter, without their involvement.

Other tasty TitS-bits from the post include the fact that Recettear has sold a whopping 300,000 copies to date, which along with the "successful" Chantelise and Fortune Summoners means that "Carpe Fulgur has never been healthier" - something that should ease the minds of fans worried that the team may have fallen off the map.

As for the just revealed Trails in the Sky: SC, Carpe Fulgur's Andrew Dice is of the opinion that it is "not just our largest localization to date, but is without hyperbole one of the largest projects in the history of the industry." Blimey. Carpe Fulgur are handling the localisation of Trails SC , while FC "was done some years ago and nearly drove poor Jessica Chavez of XSEED mad in the attempt". That's coming to PC this Winter, while Carpe Fulgur's herculean effort is arriving next year. There's also a third chapter awaiting translation - but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

My JRPG knowledge has seriously lapsed since the late 90s, but I've heard good things about Trails in the Sky. As with the Ys games, Trails will be heading to Steam. Read Andrew Dice's blog post for more info, or stick around for a ridiculously brief announcement trailer.

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As the son of a shopkeeper in real life I know for a fact that helping out in the storeroom is not a magical experience. So Recettear, while jovial in spirit and generally compelling, didn’t appeal to me in the same way as it did others. In the storerooms of the non-digital world there are lots of cardboard boxes to tear apart and smelly bins to stand on in an effort to crush rubbish and make space. Once, there was a fist-sized hole torn in the wall by an errant RPG of a completely different nature. It was dreadful and there was rubble in the 10p mix-ups. But that’s Northern Ireland for you, and another story altogether. (more…)

Fortune Summoners is Now Available on Steam and 25% off until Monday February 6th 10AM PST.

Elemental Stones: stones imbued with the power of an Elemental Spirit, which grant the wielder of one the ability to control that element via 'magic'.

In the country of Scotsholm, three centuries have passed since they were first created. Elemental stones are now mass-produced and widely used, making magic a personal, commonplace part of people's lives.

In this country lives an energetic little girl named Arche. Arche, having moved with her family to a new home in the town of Tonkiness, has begun attending the only school in the area. That school is the Minasa-Ratis School of Magic. And it's here that Arche may discover something amazing about elemental stones... and herself.

Just a quick one, as I’m supposed to be in the middle of cooking a curry and if my girlfriend catches me posting instead of chopping onions she’ll… WhatwasthatohgodI’mgonnadie.

Okay. Okay. It was only a passing seagull. Got to be speedy here. Side-scrolling RPG Fortune Summoners, the next translated Japanese indie game from Carpe Fulgur, now has an English-language demo. That’s here, at a svelte cost of 66MB. And its release date and price are newly confirmed as January 17th, 2012 and 25 USD/20 EUR/£16. Right, I need to slice some mushrooms before I get sliced up myself. Have fun!

Recettear merchants Carpe Fulgur recently released their second translated Japanese indie title, Chantelise, to the English-speaking world. The all-action dungeon-runner has been a little more divisive than its shopkeeping-centric predecessor, but it’s definitely picked up fans. Seems like a good time to chat to Carpe Fulgur’s Andrew Dice about the reception to the game, the debate over its difficulty, the argument around whether old Japanese gaming traditions such as painful low-health noises and repetition should be revisited, what the Japanese indie scene is like compared to its mainstream, and what to expect from project number 3, Fortune Summoners…>(more…)